Weak
by SignsofSam
Summary: In one night, Nathan’s perspective of his teenage life changed, and for once, he believed himself when he said those four words. You are not weak. Nathan centric, M for mentions of abuse and language.


**Title: **Weak

**Author: **SN Brown

**Rating: **M for strong themes of abuse. And language.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own any of the characters from _One Tree Hill_ and am only borrowing for my story.

**Word Count:** ~3600 words

**Summary:** The lack of self confidence, the self deprecation, was so tangible and fresh in Nathan's mind as he remembered his own teenage years. He shook his head, hand pushing Kyle's head up, so he could look into the kid's eyes. In one night, Nathan's perspective of his teenage life changed, and for once, he believed himself when he said those four words. You are not weak.

**Author's Note: **I do not condone any of the actions in this story, and would like everyone to remember that this is merely a work of fiction to present a viewpoint on a certian issue. Please also note that it is my opinion that there is a special place in hell for child abusers/molesters and that I definitely believe karma is a bitch.

So, this came about last night when my friend and I were watching _The Secret Life of the American Teenager_ (is that the title? My friend watches it; I was simply letting her :)) Any way, if you've seen it, then you know the story behind Ricky's past...and that got this stuck in my head (and away from my _actual_ One Tree Hill Story I should be working on;P) Please review; you know how much i like them. (It's seriously like an addiction.)

Also, good news: chapter one of my new OTH story is done, so if you want an excerpt, pm me. If you aren't signed in, remember to include an email address, making sure to write it like: thisismyemail(at)yahoo(dot)com. Since the chapter's already done, expect an immediate reply (or a reply within twenty-four hours, since I won't be home until 7 tomorrow and leave at 9 am. If i get the message tonight, I'll send it out before I go to bed (probably around 1).

Enjoy, and please review!

**Weak**

_He had his knees pulled up to his chest, head laying on the bony knobs as he watched the world pass around him. He had been shaking earlier, in the car as they waited, but now he sat quietly, wondering if he was passive and still if they would simply ignore him. _

_A single tear fell down his cheek, splattering to the ground and fracturing into many pieces. He lifted a hand to wipe away the tear track it had left behind, only to stop as he stared at black and purple bruises that littered the pale skin. A fresh tear began its trek down his cheek, and this time he simply didn't bother with it. What did it matter?_

_He felt disgusted with himself, with the situation, with how he was too weak to fight back, pathetic, vulnerable, stupid…__weak_.

"_You're weak, you know that?" the man said, closing and locking the door as he entered Nathan's small room, a sick grin on his face. "You're so weak that you're gonna let me do…" he paused, licking his lips as malicious green eyes looked the scrawny body over "whatever I want to you."_

He shook his head, more tears beginning to flow, another sign of weakness emanating from his body. He began shaking-again-the tears not stopping as that memory flooded his mind, as the memory found every crevice, and place, in his body and settled, _you're weak_ repeating over and over again in his mind.

"Nathan?" His head shot up, and he stumbled to get out of the chair at the officer's closeness, hearing the plastic chair tip over, jumping as it slammed into the ground. He began backing up, much like he had begun this ordeal, and the officer put his hands up, staying where he was. "Nathan? I'm not going to hurt you. I'm here to help. I just need you to come give your statement. Do you need…"

Nathan frantically shook his head, biting his bottom lip the officer was afraid he would begin drawing blood. He called for backup, female backup, careful to stay far enough away that the teen wouldn't feel threatened.

_He was backing up as quickly as possible, not really sure why considering he had no where to go but to the wall on the far side of the room, where he would be trapped until the man…until Damien…did what he wanted and left._

"_Oh now, why do we have to play this game? You know how I hate this game," the steady, sinister voice said, and Nathan shook his head. _

"_Please, no. I'll do whatever…whatever you want, just not this. Please!" He screamed, wondering if anyone could hear, or if they were all choosing to ignore, as they did to the other children. He knew what happened if Damien took a fancy to you, and he knew what happened if you didn't let him._

"_So you would rather me have one of the children, huh? Maybe the little boy, Jamie? Or your friend Tim? You'd rather me have-"_

"_No." Nathan shook his head, trying to stop his shaking, to be a man, to not be __**weak**__. "No."_

"_Well, I think you need to show me that you don't want me to do that."_

"Please…"

"What was that, Nathan?" His head jerked up, and blue eyes met brown as he stared at the cop across the table from him. Keith Scott, the man had said after offering the teen something to drink. He gripped the cup of water tight, looking back down at the scratched table. "I know you're scared, and I know you don't want to talk to me, but I need you to know that I'm never going to do what that bastard did to you, how he hurt you…"

"No," Nathan murmured, and Keith nodded, standing up.

"We're just waiting for someone to come get you, okay? They're going to help you.." He didn't know what to say as he left the room, left the poor kid sitting there, the blanket around his shoulders beginning to fall, revealing pale white skin and collar bones and vertebrate knobs showing underneath that same stretched skin.

He emptied his stomach in one of the toilets, a tear falling for the boy. He looked so lost, looked so defenseless, as he had when they had found him, in the room, the man on top of him, the man…

_His hand trailed to the bottom for his shirt, and he reached for it, pulling it up, off of him, a show of confidence that he'd go through this to protect those he cared about. He threw it to the side, eyes never leaving Damien's. His body started wrenching with sobs, but he kept his eyes on the other man's, waiting for his next instructions._

"_That was it? Your show? If I wanted that, I could go to Jamie," Damien threatened, punching the boy._

"_No, no, I can do better, I promise," Nathan cried out, closing his eyes and trying to calm shaking hands as they headed down to undo his jeans. He pushed them off slim hips, eyes never straying. If they strayed, he'd lose his nerve, forget about all he cared about, and that couldn't happen._

"What's going on with the kid?" Karen Roe asked her husband as she set a plate of food on the table, Keith home from another long night at the station. He was special, worked very well with children, and was one of the lead investigators for children's crimes, and she kenw when one was bothering him because he'd be at the station relentlessly, trying to help as best he could.

"His guardian was sexually abusing him, and others. He's…Karen, the kid is…he's messed up. He needs help. He's hurt in mental ways that I couldn't even begin to heal, and he's scared of me! How am I supposed to help him if I can't even get near him? If he won't let me near…"

"Keith, you just have to find that one way to connect with him, like you do with all the other kids, like you did with Lucas. You have to be patient, but you can help. You will help him.

_He could remember the first time Damien looked at him with that stinging leer that made him cringe, when he first arrived. His foster father-he was told later that he was supposed to call him Dad, which internally made him cringe-had pressed against him, his first night, murmuring something about fun that Nathan was glad he missed the meaning of._

_The man had forced a kiss on him six weeks later, and for six months, Nathan lived in his very own personal hell, complete with a Hades that currently had his arm in a vise-like grip, leading him to the ratty mattress that served as Nathan's bed. "Please don't," he begged one last time, knowing it would be futile._

_Instead, Damien pushed him onto the mattress, and he closed his eyes, praying for a miracle, for salvation to finally find him._

_Or for death to take him._

_He hadn't ever thought about taking his life until this mess with Damien, not when his mother left, when his father began hitting the bottle a little too hard, when his brother died. He had never hated his life so much that he would be willing to give it up in order to feel…nothing._

_He'd give anything to feel nothing now, as one of Damien's hands began to trail._

"Nathan?"

He woke up, gasping, pushing as far from the voice and the edge of the bed as was possible. Light flooded in to the large room, and he knew the other kids were looking at him, but he couldn't get past anything but the closeness of the person calling to him.

"Nathan? It's Lynn. I need to focus, to breathe. It's okay. Damien's not here, and he's not going to hurt you ever again."

Slowly, it came back to him, after gulping breaths and tense seconds of a body caught in a perpetual nightmare, but he did return. He sat up on the bunkbed, away from the woman, but still looking at her, watching every movement, ready to move. "Nate, your foster parents are here. You want to come down and meet them?"

He cringed, thinking about his last foster parents, about Damien, about how he had used the system in order to get weak children….he shook his head timidly.

"Okay. Why don't you get dressed, go get some food downstairs, and when you're ready, come to my office? Anytime you're ready."

He nodded slowly, and she smiled, leaving him alone.

Now he was looking across the blacktop at the deteriorating basket, holding the burnt orange basketball in his hands, licking his lips as he focused on the net, bouncing the ball, once, twice, a third time before letting it sail, watching it hit the square on the backboard before falling into the net.

Another shot, another, nearly continuous, twelve shots, all in a row. He's steeling himself up inside, preparing to do battle. You are not weak, he tells himself.

You are not weak.

The feeling only lasts long enough for him to get into the office, and once he saw the tall, broad-shoulder man stand from a chair, the resolve fails and he's left cowering in the corner.

_His eyes are closed tight, trying to rid himself of the feeling of Damien's hand where it doesn't belong, and to imagine something happy._

_A laugh, and he feels Damien's sweaty lips on his cheek. He doesn't know why the man tries with the whole kissing and romanticism thing, because there is nothing remotely romantic about raping a child._

_There, he said it, the big, bad r-word. _

_He still feels weak._

"_It's because you are," Damien says in turn, and his eyes open, focus, and only then he realizes that he said the words he had been thinking. "You are weak, and it shows. No real man would be someone else's bitch."_

Dan Scott's first encounter with Nathan did not go well, he thought as he drove the SUV over the bridge leading towards his neighborhood, glancing back every-so-often at the teen, who was preoccupied with looking anywhere else but at Dan.

He's a handsome kid, Dan realized, underneath all the grime and dirt of being abused for six months. He just needed a few good meals, some good friends, parents who cared…and he'd be okay.

Dan would make sure of that, because the kid deserved a hell of a lot more than what he had gotten in life. He deserved more than a bastard name Damien who got his jollies off raping children, and he deserved more than parents that abandoned him to a fucked-up system that would allow Damien to get his hands on Nathan.

"If there's anything you want to change about it, we can," Dan quickly said as he watched Nathan stare at the room in front of him. "Don't hesitate to ask, okay? Anything you want, anything you need." Keith had told him about the kid's past, and Dan figured that it was best giving him choices…the kid had never had choices-options-before.

_Damien had removed his shirt, but thankfully remained clothed on his bottom half as his hands began stripping off Nathan's thin boxers. No, no, nonononononononononononono.._

_That was when the door burst open, Damien pushing up, off Nathan's chest as shouts and threats and lights pervaded the room. Able to escape now, Nathan quickly scrambled away, pressing his body tight into a corner and staying there, hoping to be invisible._

_He was there teen, twenty minutes when Keith Scott came forward, with a blanket. "Here, son, let's get you covered up," he said gently, ignoring the tears, the shivering, wrapping him tight. "It's okay," he whispered, over and over again, in a soothing tone that coaxed Nathan from his corner, to the female medic. "You're safe now."_

In his first four nights at the Scott house, he had woken Dan and Deb up four times straight, and once wet the bed. But Dan simply smiled, told him not to worry, and cleaned it up, always making sure he had fresh sheets before he crawled back into the bed (Nathan had offered to sleep in the wet ones, and Dan and Deb had looked at him with weary surprise before promptly negating his offer).

It was the first time in a handful of months that Nathan trusted a man to be within a couple of feet of him without panicking that the man might try to do things with him. It was mostly because Dan was patient, and Dan was kind, and Dan always showed sympathy without pity. It was because the night he wet the bed, after Dan had cleaned up the sheets, he had sat in the boy's room, in a corner across from the bed, watching over his foster son incase his nightmare-Damien should return so he could fight him off. It was because Dan had showed him a lock on the door the first day he was there, and told him that he could lock it to keep him out, and Dan wouldn't judge or get angry.

The fifth day, he had a nightmare that made him scream so loud that Dan had entered the room with a baseball bat in his hands. When he saw Nathan arched in the bed, begging his imaginary torturer no (_Please, I'll be a good boy, I'll do it)_, he had dropped the bat and come running, gently shaking his charge awake, letting Deb soothe him.

"I'm sorry I'm weak," Nathan apologized, and Dan looked at him strangely, setting the warm milk on the nightstand by the bed. "I'm sorry…"

"You aren't weak, Nate. You got taken advantage of because you're a child, and no one should have ever done that to you. You don't deserve that, and you don't deserve to think you are weak, because you aren't. The man who did this to you-Damien-he was weak, because he took out his anger to the world on someone who couldn't fight back."

When Dan put his hand on Nathan's shoulder, he felt comforted by the weight, and he leaned into it, willingly.

Not weak.

_Nathan watched as they took Damien away, the man's eyes on his favorite boy, and he jerked back, hitting an officer, Keith. He turned, backed again, hitting another person, and he whimpered._

"_Here, son, I couldn't get any of your clothes, but one of our officers had and extra set with him and said you can have them." When Nathan didn't reach out a hand, Keith set the clothes on a table close by, and told Nathan that he could change when he was ready. _

_It took him hours._

The trial of Damien was sixteen months after the crime, and Nathan sat between his parents in the courtroom, looking at Dan, who squeezed his shoulder. "You're going to be okay, Nathan. Remember, this bastard is weak, not you."

It was the first time Dan had had to say the words in six months, but he knew Nathan needed them now more than ever. It didn't matter that he had a family who loved him (Deb and Dan had filed for adoption only two months after they brought Nathan home), a girlfriend who knew about his past and still loved him (Haley wasn't told until a couple of weeks ago. She had sat beside him, stunned, before she began crying, leaning on him for comfort) and friends who knew he had a past but didn't particularly care (except for Lucas, who had helped talk him into trying out for the basketball team, helped him out with the whole Haley thing, become an instant best friend), because in front of Damien Nathan still felt weak.

"I don't know if I can do this," Nathan whispered, leaning into his father's touch. The prosecutor had requested a closed courtroom, and the judge had accepted that motion, but he still had to see Damien.

"Yes, you can, Nathan. I have all the faith in you in the world."

He faced his demon that day, looked into his eyes as he recounted the stories of abusive, of the invasion of privacy and confidence on the most private and personal levels. He bravely told the tale of that night-the night when Keith came-and let the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, and the accused hear of the weakness, of the show, of how pathetic he felt as he did as Damien told.

Afterwards, he sought the comfort of his family, let himself be soothed by Dan's constant litany of 'you were never weak', and finally realized that Dan wasn't lying.

It wasn't weak to simply submit to someone who had used you for six months when you knew full well what would happen to others if you didn't. It wasn't weak to be forced to be abused. It was weak to force someone to partake in acts that he or she didn't want to. It was weak to take the trust someone gave you and manipulate it.

And it was weak to abuse a child to get your satisfaction.

-------------

It took him many years to finally be comfortable with not only his past, but how it shaped him. Dan worried about his son for the first couple of years, but was ultimately surprised when Nathan succeeded on the basketball court, became a leader within his team and in the classroom, and got a scholarship to UNC because of his diligence.

When his knee blew out in a game against Duke, he watched Nathan accept the fact that he wouldn't be able to play basketball professionally, and once again rise gracefully to get a teaching degree in biology and return to Tree Hill to teach honors biology at the high school and coach alongside Whitey Durham.

He was happy-but surprised-when Nathan married Haley James on the beach the day after graduation, and was ecstatic when he got the call a year later that Haley was in labor. Nathan spoiled James Lucas Scott to his fullest extent, showering all the love and devotion he could onto the baby, all the love and devotion he had so craved when he was a child.

Nathan's defining moment came five years later, as the twenty-four-year-old sat in his new office, looking over Whitey's playbooks after he had retired. He heard yelling from the locker room, and walked quietly towards it, sure two of his boys had gotten into a scuffle.

He was met with one of his best players cowering in the corner beneath an older man in a suit, his hand raised to strike the kid. Without thinking, Nathan grabbed the man's arm, jerking him away from his player. "I think you need to leave," he whispered, his voice steady even though his insides were beginning to feel fear as memories of Damien flooded his mind.

The man pushed him, and Nathan struck back, hitting him square in the jaw with all the anger and fury he felt towards the man, towards Damien, towards any person that would dare hit a child. "Get out before I call the police."

The man struggled to his feet, glaring angrily at Nathan before turning around and smacking his son. Nathan pulled the man back, getting in between his player and the abuser. "Get away from him. I'm not afraid to beat your ass."

"What are you gonna do, boy?" the man slurred, and Nathan could feel the kid behind him begin to shake. "I remember the story in the paper about you, about how you lied about that man-"

He didn't get the rest of the words out, before Nathan's fist hit the other side of his jaw before his other smashed into his chest. Nathan turned to his player, unballing his hands and approaching the kid much like Keith had the first time he met Nathan, hands up, showing that he was no one to fear. "Kyle, why don't we get back to my office? I've got a friend you can call, who can help."

"Someone can get me out of this?" Kyle whispered, and Nathan nodded, taking a step back, the teen following. "How do you know?"

"Someday I'll tell you, maybe. Let's just get you out of this now."

That night, he brought Kyle home to Haley, the continuous cycle beginning again. As the two stood in the guest room, Nathan handing Kyle some clothes, the boy backed away. "You must think I'm so weak…I don't know how you can stand to have me on that team-"

The lack of self confidence, the self deprecation, was so tangible and fresh in Nathan's mind as he remembered his own teenage years. He shook his head, hand pushing Kyle's head up, so he could look into the kid's eyes. "If you think you are weak, then we have two totally different definitions of that word. And believe me, you'll realize one day that your definition of weak-you, some kid like you, who was hit on and had to hide it and suffer without anyone there to help-doesn't exist. You are strong. And don't let anyone tell you different. "

And in one night, Nathan's perspective of his teenage life changed, and for once, he believed himself when he said those four words.

_You are not weak_.


End file.
